In order to find and attract clients, you need to know who you want to work with. Every decision you make in your business relies on the knowledge of who you want to support.

The health & wellness industry was my niche as a Virtual Assistant, but this is still quite a broad audience. Here's how I narrowed my target audience further and provide a service to suit their needs.

As you develop your skills as a Virtual Assistant, you may feel drawn to working with a favourite tool, system or project. Over time, with more experience under your belt, you can niche further to offer specific services and charge clients for 'specialist' skills.

Upwork

A popular, global freelance site for finding short term and long term projects. When you setup a profile, Upwork highlights key jobs you'd be suitable for.

All time recording, contracts and payments are handled via Upwork, therefore you pay a small percentage of your hourly rate for each project. The more success you have with projects, the greater your feedback rating and the more jobs Upwork will put you forward for.

OFFICE 360 & G SUITE

Office 365 and G Suite are a suites of productivity tools that let you perform common business tasks online. Both allow you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and collaborate with others whilst doing so. They also provide email, video calls and cloud file storage.

6:00am-8:00am

When I worked in a 9-5 corporate job, my mornings consisted of racing around the house trying to get showered and changed whilst eating breakfast on the go to ensure I didn’t miss the bus!

Working for myself, there’s no need for an alarm clock as I naturally wake up with the sunrise and have amble time to do as I choose before logging online to start the working day. So, depending on my energy levels, I’ll choose to either snooze, go for a walk, take a HIIT class or yoga session.

As a Virtual Assistant, you have the flexibility to flow with your natural cycle and moods of the day {1}.

As a Virtual Assistant, I chose to only work with holistic health and wellness businesses. Choosing a niche played a significant part in the rapid success of The Healthy VA (and my personal development). Here's why....

Virtual Assistants often work on an hourly basis and charge a per-hour rate. Therefore, they must have efficient time recording tools and systems in place to ensure they are capturing and all the work completed.

Having worked in a time recording capacity for a number of years, here's my best practice tips...

With the explosion of the internet and the ever expanding virtual world, the category of 'work' is no longer limited to 'one job, one employer'. The options are endless and empowering, especially for those who like the flexibility of working remotely, without having to report to a manager or sit in an office for 7 hours straight!

It is now possible for anyone to successfully work full-time online, location dependant and create a successful career.

The main reason people start businesses is for the freedom it supposedly affords, and yet, the majority of business owners and entrepreneurs inevitably find themselves constrained by their business, due to a lack of time to get everything done. This is where a VA can come to the rescue and step in to take various tasks off their clients’ plates, so that they can focus more on the core of their business.

Here are some in demand VA services to consider offering to your clients

YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE YOUR SH*T TOGETHER

If you’re the type of person who loves To Do lists, colour-coded Post It Notes and can maintain a certain level of self discipline, then this game is for you. If you’re scatty, forgetful and a frequent procrastinator, stay in the traditional workforce for your own sake!

Thanks to social media management tools, we're able to schedule posts in advance for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ on behalf of our clients, saving us a lot of time and energy as virtual assistants. Instagram on the other hand had always been manual, as originally it was created to share 'in the moment' photos.

But seeing as I needed to manage 5+ clients Instagram accounts, there was no way I was going to do this manually! So, I searched high and low for scheduling tools and found these programs...

GOOGLE DRIVE

Google Drive offers online storage space and the ability to create documents and spreadsheets (automatically saved online, rather than desktop), which you can share with others.

My Google Drive account contains all client contracts, processes and procedures, social media graphics, presentations, client work etc, which I can access from my laptop and phone wherever I connect to the internet.

WEBINARJAM

Great for video webinars, e.g for marketing campaigns and training large groups.

As well as being on the video, you can use 'share screen' to flip between your slide presentation. You can also let attendees type questions and 'call upon' attendees to enter the video with you (if you'd like them to ask their question live on screen).

It's a fab tool which also offers registration pages, pre/post automated emails and automatically posts your recorded video directly on to YouTube.

Being the tech geek that I am, I love discovering new online tools that make life easier. Hopefully, you've not been using the same password for all your online accounts, right? If you do, you may be putting your accounts at risk to hackers.

You also shouldn't scribble passwords down on a piece of paper, because what would you do if you lost it?!

However, trying to remember several different passwords can be challenging.

In the last few weeks, we've seen a public online spat between high profile Dieticians/Nutritionists and health conscious IIN-qualified celebrities. It's caused a bit of a stir in the health community as Nutritionists defend their 'turf' from the wave of Health Coaches sweeping the Aussie shores.

I graduated from IIN in 2013 and am often asked about the school by prospective students. Having seen (and felt) the online criticism, I wanted to write about my experience with IIN, in response to the debate.